Nils Abraham Langlet (9 July 1868 – 30 March 1936; known by his second given name) was a Swedish

chemist A chemist (from Greek ''chēm(ía)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a graduated scientist trained in the study of chemistry, or an officially enrolled student in the field. Chemists study the composition of ...

Biography

Langlet was born in

Södertälje Södertälje ( , ) is a Urban areas in Sweden, city in Stockholm County, Sweden and seat of Södertälje Municipality. It is also a part of Stockholm urban area, Greater Stockholm Metropolitan Area. As of 2020, it has 73,872 inhabitants. Södert� ...

, Sweden. He was the son of architect Emil Victor Langlet (1824–1898) and his wife, author Clara Mathilda Ulrika Clementine Söderén (1832–1904). His brothers included author Valdemar Langlet (1872–1960). From 1886 to 1896, he studied chemistry under

Per Teodor Cleve Per Teodor Cleve (10 February 1840 – 18 June 1905) was a Swedish chemist, biologist, mineralogist and oceanographer. He is best known for his discovery of the chemical elements holmium and thulium. Born in Stockholm in 1840, Cleve earned ...

(1840–1905) at

Uppsala University Uppsala University (UU) () is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in operation. Initially fou ...

, where he became a philosophy graduate in 1888, Philosophy Licentiate in 1893 and obtained a doctorate in 1896 and was made '' docent'' in the same year. In 1899, he became lecturer in Chemistry and Chemical Technology at the Chalmers University of Technology in

Gothenburg Gothenburg ( ; ) is the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, second-largest city in Sweden, after the capital Stockholm, and the fifth-largest in the Nordic countries. Situated by the Kattegat on the west coast of Sweden, it is the gub ...

, where he received a professorship in the same field in 1911. From 1926, when his professorship was divided, he was professor of

Organic Chemistry Organic chemistry is a subdiscipline within chemistry involving the science, scientific study of the structure, properties, and reactions of organic compounds and organic matter, organic materials, i.e., matter in its various forms that contain ...

. In 1895, Langlet had made plans to reinvestigate the gas often present in samples of the uranium-bearing mineral cleveite. Although the American chemist William Francis Hillebrand had identified the gas as nitrogen in 1890, Langlet had been prompted by Cleve's suggestion that the gas might instead be

argon Argon is a chemical element; it has symbol Ar and atomic number 18. It is in group 18 of the periodic table and is a noble gas. Argon is the third most abundant gas in Earth's atmosphere, at 0.934% (9340 ppmv). It is more than twice as abu ...

, which had just been discovered by William Ramsay and John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh. In the paper he wrote on his investigation, Langlet stated "Obstructed by other work, however, I had to postpone this investigation for a couple of weeks and had just begun it when the news reached Prof. Cleve that helium had been found y Ramsayin cleveite.... I continued the investigation I had begun in the hope of obtaining a product that differed from Ramsay's at least to some extent through possible differences in starting material and method of preparation." Although Langlet cannot be credited as an independent discoverer of the element

helium Helium (from ) is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol He and atomic number 2. It is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic, inert gas, inert, monatomic gas and the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. Its boiling point is ...

, he was the first to correctly measure its

atomic weight Relative atomic mass (symbol: ''A''; sometimes abbreviated RAM or r.a.m.), also known by the deprecated synonym atomic weight, is a dimensionless physical quantity defined as the ratio of the average mass of atoms of a chemical element in a giv ...

.Langlet, N. A. (1895) Om heliums atomvigt. Öfversigt af Kongl. Vetenskaps-Akademiens Förhandlingar, 371-377. He died in

, Sweden.

References

1868 births 1936 deaths People from Södertälje Swedish chemists Uppsala University alumni Academic staff of the Chalmers University of Technology {{chemist-stub